Storage and Retrieval: How databases lay out data on disk. Different storage engines are optimized for different workloads; choosing correctly has a huge effect on performance.
Replication: How strategic replication can reduce access latency, increase availability, and increase read throughput, plus the advantages and disadvantages of different replication approaches.
The Trouble with Distributed Systems:The wide range of distributed system problems that arise in practice, the challenge of detecting faults, and ways to make the system fault tolerant.